Installing Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) on a Thinkpad T60p

Here's a list of the important stuff in the T60p:

If it's not listed here, then it wasn't important to me, and I didn't try to make it work. If it's listed here but there are no specific notes about it below, then it just works. If there's something you want to figure out that I don't discuss here, you should check Linux On Laptops and/or the ThinkWiki T60p page.

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PCI Express Graphics Port (rev 03)
0000:00:1b.0 0403: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
0000:00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
0000:00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
0000:00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.2 0106: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controllers cc=AHCI (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 71c4
0000:02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller
0000:03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation: Unknown device 4227 (rev 02)
0000:15:00.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1510 PC card Cardbus Controller
          

There is a small partition at the end of the disk that's used for recovery. In the standard configuration, it comes up when you press the ThinkVantage button. Grub will recognize it as a Windows partition and put it in the grub menu. If you every want to access the recovery tools after install, simply boot this partition from the grub menu, since the ThinkVantage button won't work any more after you install grub to the MBR. Most of the tools won't work for me, since I don't have a Windows system on the machine. However, someone with a dual boot configuration will probably be happy to have left that partition alone.

I used custom partitioning, and blew away all but the last partition, and then created one big extended partition from all the available space. I made three logical partitions for /, /home, and /usr/local, and then moved on to the next screen without adding a swap partition. I then went back to the partitioning screen and found that there was around 6GB of space that wasn't in a partition (even though I had specified that my extended partition would take all available space). I turn the 6GB partition into my swap partition. If I remember correctly, I may have had to exit the installer and restart after partioning so that the later screens (after the partitioning screen) would recognize the new swap partition.

After the base install was complete and the machine had rebooted, I installed a bunch of other stuff that I need. The one thing that everyone should do is: sudo apt-get install linux-686-smp. I also recommend setting a root passwd (sudo passwd root) so that you can boot into recover mode if something goes wrong in the future. And finally, I changed this line in /boot/grub/menu.lst:

    # defoptions=quiet splash

to this:

    # defoptions=nosplash

because I like to see the messages during boot, just in case something happens. I tried using defoptions=vga=835 to get a 1400x1050 framebuffer for the console, but I then could not use Fn+FN to switch to a console from X11.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
mapping eth0
        script /usr/local/bin/wireless-scheme
        map my-wireless-essid 00:00:DE:AD:BE:EF wireless-home
        map wireless-external ANY wireless-office
        map ANY ANY wireless-othernet

iface wireless-home inet static
address 192.168.1.3
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
dns-nameservers 192.168.1.1
wireless-essid my-wireless-essid

iface wireless-office inet dhcp
wireless-essid wireless-external

iface wireless-othernet inet dhcp
wireless_essid any

mapping eth1
        script /usr/local/bin/wired-scheme
        map 192.168.1.4 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1 wired-home
        map IGNORE IGNORE IGNORE wired-othernet

iface wired-home inet static
address 192.168.1.4
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
dns-nameservers 192.168.1.1

iface wired-othernet inet dhcp
          

#!/bin/bash

if [ `id -u` -ne 0 ] || [ "$1" = "" ]; then exit 1; fi

IFACE=$1
WHICH=""

if [[ -z "$IFACE" ]]; then exit 1; fi

if ! ifconfig "$IFACE" up 2> /dev/null; then exit 1; fi

if ! ifconfig "$IFACE" 2> /dev/null | grep -q 'RUNNING'; then
    echo "Ignoring Wired Connection: $IFACE not connected" >&2
    ifconfig "$IFACE" down 2> /dev/null
    exit 1;
fi

while read ADDR NETMASK PINGPOINT SCHEME; do

    if [[ -n "$WHICH" ]]; then continue; fi

    if [[ "$ADDR" == "IGNORE" &&
          "$NETMASK" == "IGNORE" &&
          "$PINGPOINT" == "IGNORE" ]]; then

        WHICH="$SCHEME"
        continue
    fi

    if ! ifconfig "$IFACE" "$ADDR" netmask "$NETMASK" up; then continue; fi

    if ! ping -c 1 "$PINGPOINT" >& /dev/null 2>&1; then continue; fi

    WHICH="$SCHEME"
    continue
done

ifconfig "$IFACE" down 2> /dev/null
if [[ -n "$WHICH" ]]; then echo "$WHICH"; exit 0; fi
exit 1
          

#!/bin/bash

if [ `id -u` -ne 0 ] || [ "$1" = "" ]; then exit 1; fi

IFACE="$1"
WHICH=""

# do nothing if eth1 is already running
if ifconfig eth1 2> /dev/null | grep -q 'UP'; then
    echo "Ignore Wireless Connection: eth1 is active" >&2
    exit 1
fi

# do nothing if eth1 is plugged in
if ifconfig eth1 up 2> /dev/null; then
    if ifconfig eth1 2> /dev/null | grep -q 'RUNNING'; then
        echo "Ignore Wireless Connection: eth1 is connected" >&2
        ifconfig eth1 down 2> /dev/null
        exit 1
    fi
    ifconfig eth1 down 2> /dev/null
fi

# now try to determine the wireless scheme
while read ESSID MAC SCHEME; do

    if [ -n "$WHICH" ]; then continue; fi

    if ! ifconfig "$IFACE" up; then exit 1; fi
    if ! iwconfig "$IFACE" essid "$ESSID"; then continue; fi

    if [[ "$ESSID" == "ANY" ]]; then ESSID=".*"; fi

    for (( i=0; i<10; i++ )); do
        sleep 1
        if [[ "$MAC" != "ANY" ]]
        then
            if iwlist "$IFACE" scan | egrep -q "Address: $MAC"
            then
                WHICH="$SCHEME"
            fi
        else
            if iwlist "$IFACE" scan | egrep -q "ESSID:\"$ESSID\""
            then
                WHICH="$SCHEME"
            fi
        fi
        if [[ -n "$WHICH" ]]
        then
            echo "Configuring $IFACE using scheme $WHICH ..." >&2
            echo $WHICH
            exit 0
        fi
    done

    ifconfig "$IFACE" down 2> /dev/null
done

exit 1
          

The ATI card in this machine isn't supported by the open-source radeon driver in Ubuntu Dapper. If you don't want to use the proprietary driver, then you'll have to use vesa, and settle for no external monitor. Since I use a dual head setup at work, I have to use the fglrx driver. Of course, that also means that I get 3D support too, which is also a good thing.

The monitor I plug in at work is a Dell 24-inch widescreen. The laptop screen at 1400x1050 has 126 DPI, and the widescreen has 96 DPI, so I don't use Xinerama, since it can't handle multiple resolutions. The fglrx driver doesn't provide very good pseudo-Xinerama support (they call it big desktop mode). It does't different DPIs or different screen sizes very well. The open-source radeon driver does a great job with this, so I wish I could us it instead. I just have to settle for not being able to drag windows from one screen to the other and not having unified window/task lists in XFCE.

For some reason, X was using the wrong resolution for the widescreen (72x72), so I explicitly set the DisplaySize values for both screens in my configuration (see below). This solved the problem.

Here are the parts of my xorg.conf that I had to tweak.

    Section "ServerLayout"
            Identifier     "Default Layout"
            Screen      0  "laptop screen" 0 0
            Screen         "wide screen" Above "laptop screen"
            InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard"
            InputDevice    "Configured Mouse"
            InputDevice    "Synaptics Touchpad"
            #Option         "Xinerama" "true"
    EndSection

    Section "Monitor"
            Identifier  "laptop monitor"
            DisplaySize 282 212
            Option      "DPMS" "true"
    EndSection

    Section "Monitor"
            Identifier  "widescreen monitor"
            HorizSync   30-81
            VertRefresh 56-76
            DisplaySize 513 324
            Option      "DPMS" "true"
    EndSection

    Section "Device"

            Identifier  "laptop device"
            Driver      "fglrx"
            BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
    EndSection

    Section "Device"
            Identifier  "widescreen device"
            Driver      "fglrx"
            BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
            Screen      1
    EndSection

    Section "Screen"
            Identifier "laptop screen"
            Device     "laptop device"
            Monitor    "laptop monitor"
            DefaultDepth     24
            SubSection "Display"
                    Viewport   0 0
                    Depth     24
                    Modes    "1400x1050"
            EndSubSection
    EndSection

    Section "Screen"
            Identifier "wide screen"
            Device     "widescreen device"
            Monitor    "widescreen monitor"
            DefaultDepth     24
            SubSection "Display"
                    Viewport   0 0
                    Depth     24
                    Modes    "1920x1200"
            EndSubSection
    EndSection
            

My desktop environment of choice is XFCE. Most of it's underlying utilities work well with the switch between dual monitor mode and single monitor mode. The only exception to this is the panel. In dual monitor mode, I need to configure two panels, one for each screen, since the panel applications (pager, tasklist, etc.) are screen specific. However, after that, if I start XFCE in single monitor mode, it complains about the panel configuration, since it doesn't know where to put the second panel. To work around this, I added my own ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc script that figures out how many screens I have, and sets up a symlink to the correct, pre-configured panel configuration file for the number of screens.

    #!/bin/bash

    SCREENS="$(xdpyinfo | awk -F: '$1 == "number of screens" { print $2; }')"
    rm -f $HOME/.config/xfce4/panel/panels.xml
    if (( SCREENS == 2 )); then
       ln -s panels-dual.xml $HOME/.config/xfce4/panel/panels.xml
    else
       ln -s panels-single.xml $HOME/.config/xfce4/panel/panels.xml
    fi

    # now run the standard system xinitrc to do the real start
    exec /bin/bash /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc
            

I had to get my panel configuration just right first, because XFCE will overwrite my symlink with the new panel config on change, rather than the file that is linked to, and my panel config changes will be lost when I next log in. That's OK for me, because I know exactly how I want the panels.